One of the most exciting things about our upcoming move to Los Angeles is the cross-country road trip that will take us there. After over a year stuck inside, for the most part, it’s going to be nice to see the country. We’re going to make Texas a big part of the trip, since it’s a big part of the trip from a milage standpoint.
I spent most of my first decade in Texas, in a little town called Katy. I don’t think modern me would like it very much, but kid me made a ton of great memories there. Adult me learned not to trust those memories.
When I was 11, living in a trailer park in Katy, my grandma called us long-distance, which was a huge deal because it cost so much. She told us she had pancreatic cancer, and within a week we’d packed up and moved to West Virginia. I wasn’t a big fan, but what can you do when you’re a kid, right?
We adapted to the local economy, which is to say we got pretty poor pretty quick. The whole decade and change I spent there was filled with trials, disappointment, and abuse. Lots of great friendships, to be sure, but I generally had very little to be happy about in West Virginia. Texas, and Katy in particular, held a spot in my heart for years as a place where things were better… A place with opportunities… The place where I left my friends.
I saw a news report about Katy when I was in college. It was about high school football, which was huge there, and involved a protest at a local high school over the treatment of a black kid who’d joined the team.
When I was a kid, I thought of most people around me as decent and kind. When I saw that report, it recontextualized several childhood memories for me. That time a deacon from church referred to his black co-worker as “one of the good ones,” it seemed like a compliment. Everybody laughed, including the co-worker.
The report made college-aged me look back at memories like that, and my childhood in general. That romantic idea of Texas as “where things were better” just wasn’t true. It seemed good at the time, likely because I was a kid who didn’t know any better. All I needed was Tiny Toons and Encyclopedia Brown books checked out from the library and I was happy. Things weren’t good in Katy, though. Looking back on it, a lot of the people, mainly adults, I thought were good people just… weren’t.
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I haven’t been back to Katy, or Texas, since 1993. When we move this summer, we’ll take a day to go see my childhood home and visit my father’s grave in Houston, since I’ve never seen it in person. I expect I’ll have even more memories thrown into a new context. I hope so, anyway.
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